About 3½ days from the start of another NHL lockout, owners and the NHLPA met for nearly three hours, with the players presenting the league with their latest proposal and receiving a counteroffer in kind.

"Hopefully in retrospect this will represent a meaningful day," NHLPA executive director Donald Fehr told reporters Wednesday afternoon, adding that it was too early to characterize the offers or reaction and that the players' proposal is "consistent with (their principles)."

One potentially important facet Fehr did confirm: The union is willing to take a lower percentage of hockey-related revenue over time.

NHL commissioner Gary Bettman sounded a less optimistic tone, saying—again—the league made "meaningful movement." He stated his belief that the union's offer wasn't appreciably different than the last one and said the league's proposal would be taken off the table on Saturday.

"I'm not going to categorize or characterize the negotiations; it's not good for the process," Bettman said.

The league's counterproposal, first reported by ESPN.com, indeed represents movement, at least relative to its initial shakedown attempt: The players's share would start at 49 percent of hockey-related revenue, then decline to 47 percent over the six-year agreement.

Bettman did drop his own important bits of information: The league included a 9 percent salary rollback in its offer. Although that's down from the 24 percent the owners requested over the summer, it's still a number the NHLPA is likely to find wholly unpalatable. The number they have in mind is closer to zero.

And, Bettman said, the league moved $250 million to $300 million back into its offer, though it's possible that a large part of that sum comes from reverting back to the previously agreed-upon definition of hockey-related revenue. The league's last offer changed the methods for calculating HRR, which meant the sides were negotiating over a smaller metaphorical pie.

The NHL maintains the lockout will begin at midnight Saturday if there isn't a new collective bargaining agreement. Nearly 300 players were in New York to meet with NHLPA leadership later on Wednesday.

The main source of disagreement remains how to split the league's $3.3 billion-and-rising revenue pool, of which players currently receive a 57 percent share. The obvious middle ground between the two sides has always been gradually dropping the players' share closer to 50 percent, avoiding rollbacks all together and expanding revenue sharing. Wednesday seems like a step closer to that.

Owners are openly looking to cut costs on salaries and initially proposed a 43 percent share with a 24 percent rollback on existing salaries. They raised that offer to about 50 percent, though that portion would come from a smaller pool of eligible revenue, and proposed an expanded escrow system that, while not a rollback, would result in players getting less than the agreed-upon value of their contracts.

The players maintain that the league's biggest problem is the chasm between its high- and low-budget teams and constructed its first proposal largely around closing that gap through expanded revenue sharing. What that proposal didn't feature, though, is widespread salary cuts the owners seek—the players proposed to limit their own growth in the first three years of the new CBA, then snap back to a 57 percent share, which would stand in contrast to the 50/50 and 47-53 splits its peers in the NFL and NBA agreed upon in their recent labor disputes.

The sides hadn't had a full bargaining session since Aug. 31, and the strife is threatening regular-season openers scheduled to start Oct. 11. The preseason schedule is set to begin Sept. 19.